In 2022, according to a Gartner, Inc. poll of CEOs and senior executives, significant shifts in their thinking about people, purpose, prices, and productivity are expected, particularly on themes of sustainability, workforce challenges, and inflation.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now the most significant new technology among CEOs for the third year in a row, according to the study’s findings. 63 percent of CEOs, on the other hand, believe the metaverse is either not applicable or highly unlikely to be a crucial technology for their company.
Additionally, for the first time in the survey’s history, CEOs ranked environmental sustainability eighth among their top ten strategic business goals. Nearly three-quarters of CEOs believed that expanding ESG activities drew investors to their companies. In 2022 and 2023, CEOs see sustainability as a competitive differentiation with brand trust among respondents.
Increasing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Efforts:
- The regulatory landscape
Regulators are now employing the instruments developed to combat the global financial crisis to address the challenge of climate risk management and the growth of green finance. With so many of these projects underway, the sector will soon be inundated with ESG-related conduct and prudential standards, which will be followed by new reporting and management requirements, as well as monitoring and oversight.
- The significance of data
It’s no surprise that in today’s data-driven world, data plays a critical role in financing and monitoring the impact of the transformation on asset values. Environmental consequences and financial investment results, such as shares, bonds, loans, and derivatives, are included in product-level sustainability statistics. This is critical for determining climate risk exposure, making informed green investment decisions, and ensuring capital flow. Although most businesses have a lot of data, producing consistent, standardized, and useable product-level data is a major difficulty.
- The ESG data’s foundation
It’s crucial to understand the foundation for ESG data, in addition to the critical (and relatively obvious) function data plays in this arena. The information included in this data is informing key financial choices, and the need for it is driven by an uncertain regulatory environment and industry-led standardization efforts. Regulators all over the world are establishing standards for product-level sustainability data, such as the European taxonomy for sustainable activities, the United Kingdom’s green taxonomy to combat greenwashing, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent proposals to support mandatory climate disclosures.
- A technological advantage
Organizations must use technology to unlock the value of data after they have a better knowledge of the relevance of data and the foundation that underpins ESG data. Financial institutions, lenders, and issuers are progressively incorporating ESG data into the legal and contractual structure that controls the financial instruments and trades in which they participate.
CEOs Prioritize workforce challenges:
For the second year in a row, CEOs prioritized workforce challenges such as talent retention, trailing only technology-related issues like digitalization and cybersecurity but far ahead of financial ones like profitability and cash flow.
In terms of general price inflation, 62 percent of CEOs regard it as a long-term or persistent concern. Instead of responding with productivity and efficiency, their main answer to inflation is to raise prices (51 percent of respondents) (22 percent of respondents).
The persistent consequences of the pandemic, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, had a huge impact on CEO perspectives in 2022. However, despite the epidemic and related difficulties, CEOs’ digital business ambitions continue to climb.
The annual Gartner 2022 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey was performed among over 400 CEOs and other senior business executives in North America, EMEA, and APAC across various industries, revenue, and company sizes between July 2021 and December 2021.